Harpur's The Pagan Christ: If Christianity is True, All Other Religions Must be False

Moses and the Ten Commandments - Rembrandt

Harpur begins his third chapter with a quotation from St. Augustine that, he claims, “utterly refutes the traditional view that Christianity … virtually fell from the skies as a radically new, unique, all-surpassing religion.” (p. 28)

Whose traditional view is this? It is not the Christian teaching. Has Harpur never heard of the Old Testament? In the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, "At all times and in every race, anyone who fears God and does what is right has been acceptable to him" (CCC, para. 781).

Christianity has never taught that the teachings of Christianity are essentially new or unique. They are all supposed to already be in the Old Testament. And the Old Testament, in turn, says that the full truth was already in the religion of Melchizedek, before Abraham, father of both the Jews and the Muslims. Adam, the first man, already knew the truth. It must be so, as Truth does not change.

What is unique and new in Christianity is the historical appearance of the person of the Christ, his death and resurrection.

Egyptian souls being judged

Harpur writes “The Ten Commandments … are all anticipated in the teachings from the Hall of Judgement” (an Egyptian text) – p.24. (You can see the actual text in translation online here.)

Exactly. Morality is binding on all. Christians point out that “The Golden Rule” is found in all religions. Good and evil are absolute quantities, not something up for grabs. Accordingly, there cannot have been anything new about the substance of the Ten Commandments. There was not a time before Moses when murdering others, stealing, and lying, were okay.



Harpur cites such figures as Eusebius, Justin Martyr, and Origen “conceding” that Christianity was essentially the same as paganism. P. 29: “Celsus, a famous pagan philosopher with whom Origen waged a well-known debate, said ‘The Christian religion contains nothing …new.’ For this, Origen had no rebuttal.”

He misrepresents this debate utterly. In fact, overall, Celsus was arguing that Christianity was different from Greek traditions, while Origen was arguing they were in conformity—the opposite of Harpur’s claim.

In general, the pagan Romans objected to Christianity as an innovation. Rightly, they held that there could be nothing new in religion: Truth does not change. The job of the early Church, therefore, was not to show that Christianity was different from Paganism; this would have implied that it was false. Their job was to show that there was nothing in Christianity that was not clearly prefigured in the Old Testament and/or the pagan religion of Greece.

No surprise, then, to find them “conceding,” indeed eagerly pointing out, similarities. As Origen himself puts it, in the passage Harpur refers to, “It is not … matter of surprise that the same God should have sown in the hearts of all men those truths which He taught by the prophets and the Saviour, in order that at the divine judgment every man may be without excuse, having the requirements of the law written upon his heart…"

Cortez

This is the obvious reason why Harpur almost never cites his sources. When you go to them, they usually say the opposite of what he claims.


On p. 29-30, Harpur writes of Cortez “complaining” that the Aztec religion was too similar to Christianity, and of Abbe Huc being “filled with consternation” at the similarities between Turkmen religion and Catholicism. As other sites have pointed out, there seems to be no source in Cortez’s known writings for the Cortez quote, while the similarities between Tatar and Catholic traditions could easily be explained by earlier Christian missionary activity. But let’s allow all this. For now, what I want to point out is that Harpur’s claim that such similarities would upset the Westerners is absurd. One is not upset, in a foreign land, by memories of home. And would Christians complain about others being too Christian?

They would of course be delighted. Christian missionaries have always sought out such parallels, and used them as an opening to introduce more Christian ideas, right from St. Paul referring to the Tomb of the Unknown God on the Areopagus, and identifying it with the god of whom he was about to speak. (Acts 17: 22-31). The initial tendency in the development of the discipline of Comparative Religion, developing as it did among Christian missionaries, has always been to seek out, and indeed to exaggerate, any similarities with Christianity.

P. 28: “Even the second-century theologian and historian Justin Martyr conceded as much when he wrote that whatever things were rightly said among the ancients ‘are now the property of Christians!” There is no concession here. This word “conceded” and the ending exclamation mark are ridiculous. If Christianity is true, it follows that anything else that is true is compatible with Christianity, and that Christianity is compatible with anything else that is true.